


Harold

by Tipsylex



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-01
Updated: 2016-11-01
Packaged: 2018-08-28 11:15:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8443768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tipsylex/pseuds/Tipsylex
Summary: Harold is lying in bed alone. He’s been alone for a while now. It doesn’t get any easier. Life seems to be passing him by. 
Harold reflects on his life.





	

**Author's Note:**

> As usual no good at titles, anyone know if there's a title generator out there somewhere?  
> If I've got anything in the wrong order in the timeline sorry, I haven't had a chance to re watch every single episode yet.  
> No beta'd so any mistakes are mine.

Harold is lying in bed alone. He’s been alone for a while now. It doesn’t get any easier. Life seems to be passing him by. His whole life he’s been consumed by a passion to create things. It started when he tried to make a machine to help his father’s failing memory. He’d taken engines apart and helped to put them back together. He’d excelled at school and ended at MIT where he’d met Nathen.

Nathen was his first love, best friend and, in the end, business partner. He’d had a few girls approach him during his college years; they’d offer sex in return for help with their assignments. He would oblige and though the sex was nice it wasn’t what he wanted. He wanted Nathen.

But Nathen wasn’t interested, at least not in that way; he had a different girl every night, had eventually married Olivia and had a child. Nathen had included Harold in his family, made him godfather to his son Will. Their working relationship flourished, Nathen was good at the public relations bit while Harold was content to stay in the background. They enjoyed evenings together, where they would drink copious amounts of alcohol and talk over old times.

Nathen would sometimes get angry with Harold. He felt that he should take a more active role with the public side of things but Harold didn’t like to. He preferred his own company. Then after 9/11 he had begun constructing the machine and he spent more and more time alone. Coding took such a long time to do. He started sleeping less, sometimes he forgot to eat or drink. Nathen kept him supplied with the things he needed. He didn’t always agree with Harold about the machine and its use. He said that everyone was relevant to someone though Harold had decided that the machine would look for the terrorist element of society, the petty crimes didn’t matter.

Then Harold had met Grace and over time decided that perhaps his interests might lie elsewhere. He fell in love with this red headed artist. He announced to Nathen that he was going to propose to her. Nathen had said it was about time and perhaps she would get to know his real name. But he didn’t tell her. He’d changed it when he’d left his home town with the FBI on his tail. She knew him as Harold Martin, Nathen knew him as Harold Wren. Now he was Harold Finch.

Then Nathen had been killed, it was by sheer luck that he’d only been on the edge of the ferry bomb blast. He had spinal damage and neck and hip injuries but at least he was alive. He’d seen Nathen dead on a bed in the area where they were taking the injured. He’d overhead some men saying that the problem had been sorted. Harold was at once grateful for all those long lonely secluded hours behind the scenes.

He grieved for his friend, he was angry at the machine; it hadn’t told him that Nathen was in danger. Harold panicked and went into hiding, pretending to have died along with the others; Grace mourned his passing and tried to move on with her life.

Harold had recovered but his body was damaged, he was in pain most of the time, he saw it as a penance for his past mistakes. He had surgeries and metal plates and pins held his fused neck together. He still walked with a limp. Some days the limp was worse than others but he mostly managed. His one indulgence, which he knew he shouldn’t do, was to keep an eye on Grace. He regretted that he couldn’t revel himself to her, that he had to stay dead.

Now Harold had begun to try and do the things he’d seen Nathen do. He’d discovered by accident that Nathen was getting the social security numbers of people who were in danger. He was putting himself in the same danger to try and stop the crimes from happening. They’d argued about it at the time but now Harold felt he had to continue what Nathen had started. He felt guilty about Nathen’s death; many times he’d wished that he’d never built the machine. He could still have been very successful in the insurance industry, they’d made a lot of money, he could have made even more. He didn’t spend much but when he did he didn’t worry about how much. He bought himself several properties around the city, even bought a couple of penthouse apartments. He’d bought the library where he worked from now. He hated all the books strewn over the floor at the entrance but it served to make it look like the building was abandoned.

It was after some of his surgery while he was still in the wheelchair that he realised he needed help. He couldn’t do much to save anyone. He was not able to run, couldn’t put up much of a fight and hated the thought of using firearms. He was in hospital undergoing physiotherapy when a man stumbled passed him bumping into his chair. His mumbled ‘sorry’ as he rushed out was almost inaudible to Harold. But Harold had seen his face. Looking at the file on his lap there was no mistaking the man and who he was. John Reese. 

Harold kept tabs on him as much as he could. Then one day he simply disappeared. Harold spent months looking for him. In the end he found him in a police station, and sent his lawyer to get him out before the police could question him very much.

He’d offered the man a job, doing the things he couldn’t do. At first John seemed reluctant but Harold had needed him. By the time Harold had taken him (with help) to the other hotel the man had cleaned himself up, shaved and showered. Harold had noticed then how handsome this man was.

Admittedly it was a risk to tie John to the bed. It was also a risk to play the sounds of the woman who had died in that room. John could have killed him, thrusting him against the wall in his rage. But in the end he had convinced John to help him. He paid him a salary, and after a while bought him an apartment so that he had somewhere to retreat to. Before that John had slept in a different place almost every night, low priced hotels and motels, places with enough facilities for him to shower and sleep. The apartment had been a gesture on Harold’s part, to show John that he didn’t need to keep moving every few days and that he was (relatively) safe from whatever it was that haunted him. Harold knew that some of it was possibly the CIA, but he never said anything. 

Their relationship had grown over time; they had come to trust each other. They saved more lives than they lost. They saved a great many more that Harold could have done alone. He liked John, he was intelligent and disciplined. He was skilled in so many things. He was a very valuable asset and Harold had tried to convey that to John. Their friendship had grown from that of employer and employee, they were friends. Almost best friends as neither had anyone else. He knew of John’s lost love, he felt guilty that he’d not been able to save her. John felt guilty too. Harold still loved Grace but from a distance and the strong feelings gradually faded to that of a very dear friend. John knew of his love for her but never commented on it. Harold didn’t like to admit it even to himself but he felt a very strong attraction to John, had done since the first day almost. He didn’t know how John felt about him but he liked to think that maybe his feelings would be returned, if only he could voice them.

Time passes and they continue their work. They add a few new people to the team; John brings Harold a dog, for protection. Harold had noticed John’s increasing possessiveness when it comes to Harold’s safety. Bear is there for when he can’t be. Shaw is a female version of John; she has a similar background and skill set. Though she is more likely to kill than John a fact he hates but accepts that sometimes even John has had to kill. Root starts out as a threat but ends as a friend too. John’s possessiveness comes from the fact that she kidnapped Harold twice; he would have killed her but for Harold’s intervention.

They go on, saving lives, helping people. And then there is another threat, Samaritan. They are forced into hiding, underground. Harold misses the library badly. The air in the subway is stale, the lighting not bright enough. His chair and computer station are not so comfortable. There’s no bedroom, no shower and worst of all no privacy. He and John were becoming closer; his heart skips a beat when John is near. He has to work hard at schooling his features lest he break out into a broad grin every time he sees John. 

It had been really hard for John once they’d taken on their new identities. John was used to being on the go, sitting at a desk doing paperwork didn’t sit well with him, he’d complained loudly about if often. Harold sympathised, he hated playing the professor teaching students who really didn’t want to be there. He’d tried to push John away, they were safer if they never met outside of the subway but John wouldn’t have it. He’d suggested that they pretend to be a couple (after all we have a dog he’d said), John could keep Harold safe and no one would take any notice. Harold had wanted with all his heart for it to be a real, for them to be a real couple but still he couldn’t voce his feelings. Still he tried to push him away but in the end agreed that they could meet socially now and again. The arrangement had settled John a bit and Harold fell just a little bit more in love with John.

Samaritan continued to be a threat, Harold figured out a way to deal with it, almost losing his life in the process. John had been angry with him for taking such a big risk. In the end he and the machine had outwitted Harold and he’d deployed the virus that was to ultimately destroy Samaritan. But Samaritan won in the end in a way because John had died on the rooftop. Harold had often said that one day they would end up dead; he’d hoped that if it happened they would be together. But realistically with him in the library/subway and John in the field he had known that it probably wouldn’t happen that way. John had said his goodbyes. The machine could do nothing to protect him, or get him away, before the missile that Samaritan had managed to deploy, had hit the building. Now Harold would never be able to tell his friend how much he loved him, how much he wished he could have been with him, body and soul.

And so now here he was in bed alone, always alone. He was not going back to the machine; it had cost him too much over the years, Nathen, Grace and now John. Life was not worth living anymore. It’s been weeks since John died. There’d been no funeral, there was nothing to bury. Only one person mourned his death, Harold. He’d regained his fortune after Samaritan had been defeated. In John’s memory he donated money to various army charities. He paid vast sums to hospitals all over the country. And in John’s home town, he’d had a hospital wing named after him. John Reese would live on in some form or another, even though that wasn’t his real name. The last thing he did was to give money to the homeless who had been looking after John when he first found him. He converted a building so that they had somewhere to get cleaned up, sleep and eat, even get new clothing if need be. He met with Joan who had directly looked after John and put her in charge.

Nothing he did made him feel better, his fortune grew almost as fast as he spent it. Money meant very little to him, never had really, but now it meant even less. He carried on living the lonely life, Will came to visit him whenever he came to town. He had remarked on Harold living is such a small place. He asked what had happened to the penthouse. Harold had just shrugged a change of scenery he’d said. But living in the apartment that he’d bought for John somehow made John feel closer to him. But he was depressed, sometimes he didn’t leave the apartment for days, he used the phone and had whatever he needed delivered. Sometimes he forgot to eat, he lost weight. Sometimes he didn’t take his medication; the pain was a reminder of all the things he had lost.

Will arrived one morning a year after John’s death to find Harold propped up in bed with one of John’s suits cradled in his arms, the open pill bottles on the night stand. He touched Harold’s neck feeling for a pulse, there was none. The jacket was wet with the tears Harold had shed.

**Author's Note:**

> I know that canon has Will abroad but at this happens after "Return 0" it fitted for me to have him visiting New York.
> 
> I can't remember if the pain killers Harold takes are ever mentioned in the show, I am assuming he would have been taking something quite strong and that overdose could result in death.


End file.
